{"title":"Books by Simon Critchley","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"9780192853592","title":"Continental Philosophy","description":"Simon Critchley's Very Short Introduction shows that Continental philosophy encompasses a distinct set of philosophical traditions and practices, with a compelling range of problems all too often ignored by the analytic tradition. He discusses the ideas and approaches of philosophers such as Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Habermas, Foucault, and Derrida, and introduces key concepts such as existentialism, nihilism, and phenomenology by explaining their place in the Continental tradition.ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56225838924149,"sku":"9780192853592","price":9.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780192853592_c046bc9e-fc0f-47df-ac5d-2e3e849d23e8.jpg?v=1786011110"},{"product_id":"9780748689323","title":"The Ethics of Deconstruction","description":"Simon Critchley’s first book, 'The Ethics of Deconstruction', was originally published to great acclaim in 1992. It was the first book to argue for the ethical turn in Derrida's work and to show as powerfully as possible how deconstruction has persuasive ethical consequences that are vital to our thinking through of questions of politics and democracy. This new edition contains three new appendixes and a new preface where Critchley reflects upon the origins, motivation and reception of 'The Ethics of Deconstruction'.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56298561208693,"sku":"9780748689323","price":25.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780748689323_13e92ab9-7486-44bf-8b9d-6feccda4f6df.jpg?v=1786014714"},{"product_id":"9781781259221","title":"What We Think About When We Think About Football","description":"What do we think about when we think about football? Football is about so many things: memory, history, place, social class, gender (especially masculinity, but increasingly femininity too), family identity, tribal identity, national identity, the nature of groups. It is essentially collaborative, even socialist, yet it exists in a sump of greed, corruption, capitalism and autocracy.Philosopher Simon Critchley attempts to make sense of it all, and to establish a system of aesthetics - even poetics - to show what is beautiful in the beautiful game. He explores, too, how the experience of watching football opens a particular dimension in time; how its magic wards off oblivion; how its dramas play out national identity and non-identity; how we spectators, watching football with tragic pensiveness, participate in the play. And of course, as a football fan, he writes about his heroes and villains: about Zidane and Cruyff, Clough and Revie, Shankly and Klopp.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56303408021877,"sku":"9781781259221","price":9.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781781259221_31419d5f-3f10-42f5-a81e-2027a2ea3e25.jpg?v=1786025540"},{"product_id":"9781781257456","title":"On Bowie","description":"What made Bowie special? What made him the cultural icon he is today? And what made millions of people around the world tune into his peculiar wavelength and find exactly what they'd been looking for all along?These are the questions asked by Simon Critchley in this keen-eyed, moving and textured tribute to Bowie. Each of the two dozen deceptively short chapters looks at Bowie from a new angle, slowly unfolding the enigma that was his artistic life into a celebration of what made him unique. From the author's earliest childhood exposure to the bizarre musical and sexual contours of Ziggy Stardust right through to the supernova glow of Blackstar, and covering everything in between, Critchley traces the development of Bowie's music and lyrics to tell the story of how he tapped into zeitgeist - and into our hearts.Growing up in working-class suburban England, the young Critchley was instantly drawn to this creature from another planet, 'so sexual, so knowing, so strange'. Now a celebrated philosopher who Jonathan Lethem has called 'a figure of quite startling brilliance', Critchley draws on a plethora of cultural and philosophical touchpoints, as well as his own intensely personal response to the music, to paint an essential portrait of Bowie as songwriter, poet, performer and icon.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56304563749237,"sku":"9781781257456","price":9.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781781257456_2882e19a-44c6-4e5f-b4be-7ad5e71101ea.jpg?v=1786025471"},{"product_id":"9781788161480","title":"Tragedy, the Greeks and Us","description":"We might think we are through with the past, but the past isn't through with us. Tragedy permits us to come face to face with the things we don't want to know about ourselves, but which still make us who we are. It articulates the conflicts and contradictions that we need to address in order to better understand the world we live in.A work honed from a decade's teaching at the New School, where 'Critchley on Tragedy' is one of the most popular courses, Tragedy, the Greeks and Us is a compelling examination of the history of tragedy. Simon Critchley demolishes our common misconceptions about the poets, dramatists and philosophers of Ancient Greece - then presents these writers to us in an unfamiliar and original light.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56305688084853,"sku":"9781788161480","price":10.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781788161480_b00c1335-96fa-463f-9037-98769fea41d6.jpg?v=1786026929"},{"product_id":"9781800816947","title":"On Mysticism","description":"Chosen by Andrew Miller as a Book of the Year in the Daily Mail'A significant and courageous invitation to think again about the kinds of thinking that matter; the kinds of thinking that keep us awake' Rowan WilliamsMysticism has been called 'experience at its most intense form', and here philosopher Simon Critchley asks: wouldn't you like to taste this intensity? Wouldn't you like to be lifted up and out of yourself?Mysticism is not a question of religious belief but of felt experience and daily practice. It is a way of freeing yourself of your standard habits, fancies and imagining so as to see what is there and stand with what is there ecstatically. It is the achievement of a fluid openness between thought and existence.This is a book about Julian of Norwich and medieval mystics that also ranges through the work of Anne Carson, Annie Dillard and T.S. Eliot. It looks at Nick Cave and German krautrock and shows how music can be secular worship. It opens the door to mysticism not as something unworldly and unimaginable, but as a way of life.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56306716574069,"sku":"9781800816947","price":11.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781800816947_0c54a402-fe3a-40e3-948f-cd499f54407f.jpg?v=1786027293"},{"product_id":"9781894699532","title":"Gareth Long","description":"Publication documenting two recent bodies of work by New York-based artist Gareth Long. Untitled (Stories) is a set of lenticular prints accompanied by the book series that pivots around a disjunction between the oeuvre of J.D. Salinger and the design of his books: the original Little, Brown \u0026amp; Co. book cover designs are a starting point for nine large-scale prints. An unfinished Gustave Flaubert novel is the central point around which the other works revolve. Bouvard and Pécuchet's Invented Desk for Copying is a suite of two-sided desk-sculptures that form the core of a related suite of projects. At the heart of both works lies a fascination with books as uniquely flexible vehicles of meaning, as complex compendia to be read, re-read and mis-read.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56308940210549,"sku":"9781894699532","price":44.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781894699532_ac5f1e73-88f1-484d-97fc-fbbb72a2c852.jpg?v=1786029283"},{"product_id":"9781916809710","title":"I Want to Die, I Hate My Life – Three Essays on Tragedy and One on Beckett","description":"“There is a common fallacy that is oddly and sadly even more widespread amongst non-philosophers than philosophers, that art is somehow explained by philosophy. It is not.”The philosopher Simon Critchley has long been drawn to the distinctive questions raised by tragedy. In this major new work, conceived as a sequel to his Tragedy, the Greeks and Us (2019), he describes the power of tragic drama as deriving from its depictions of 'stuckness': of the inescapable situation of being oneself. In readings of Jean Racine, Henrik Ibsen, and Samuel Beckett, Critchley offers an exceptionally perceptive account of how tragedy dramatises this irreducibly absurd condition.   I Want to Die, I Hate My Life is at once a searching philosophical engagement with tragedy and a bracing argument against the widespread tendency to reduce literary texts to mere illustrations of philosophical ideas. Critchley’s exposition of the ambiguities that lie at the heart of tragic drama—of tragedy’s resistance to the kind of rational explanations that philosophers have sought to impose upon it—doesn’t just enhance our understanding of literature; it also points towards a wiser, more subtle, and more dynamic way of doing philosophy.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56309538849141,"sku":"9781916809710","price":20.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781916809710_3b8d8b73-d835-4d1f-b3ed-7760412400ba.jpg?v=1786030917"},{"product_id":"memory-theatre","title":"Memory Theatre","description":"\u003cp\u003eA French philosopher dies during a savage summer heat wave. Boxes carrying his unpublished miscellany mysteriously appear in Simon Critchley’s office. Rooting through piles of papers, Critchley discovers a brilliant text on the ancient art of memory and a cache of astrological charts predicting the deaths of various philosophers. Among them is a chart for Critchley himself, laying out in great detail the course of his life and eventual demise. Becoming obsessed with the details of his fate, Critchley receives the missing, final box, which contains a maquette of Giulio Camillo’s sixteenth-century Venetian memory theatre, a space supposed to contain the sum of all knowledge. That’s when the hallucinations begin...\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57483463885173,"sku":"9780992974718","price":10.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780992974718.jpg?v=1786178630"}],"url":"https:\/\/backstory.london\/collections\/author-simon-critchley.oembed","provider":"Backstory","version":"1.0","type":"link"}